raisindot wrote: Would your Igor theory have something do with a certain wild-eyed British comedian who walked this way while crossing brooks?J-I-B

That would have been a bit obvious, wouldn't it?

Absolutely nowhere even close!

And as far as Josh Kirby paperbacks, I have all of them up to 5th Nellie when I started buying HBs. Every one of them is tatty and dog-eared through over-reading, so highlighting lines ain't going to make a scrap of difference to their value, which is zero.

"Disliking Carrot would be like kicking a puppy.""You kicked a puppy," Lobsang said accusingly.

In the sixties there was a British comidian called Freddy Parrot-Face Davies. His whole act was making the "s" sound like "th". This is the only video of him I could find on youtube, but you can get a rough idea of what he was like.

Interesting - and of course I remember Parrot-Face. But isn't it equally possible that Terry actively looks for phrases with 'S' in when he writes Igors? If he'd said: 'I'm fed up with this lot' it wouldn't have seemed so Igorish.

I know it's artistic interpretation, but Stephen Briggs' version of Igors on the audiobooks sounds very different to Parrot-Face.

Freddy used to talk more with a razz to the 'S' than a 'TH' sound. But you could be right - nothing would surprise me with Terry's references.

poohcarrot wrote:In the sixties there was a British comidian called Freddy Parrot-Face Davies. His whole act was making the "s" sound like "th". This is the only video of him I could find on youtube, but you can get a rough idea of what he was like. A coincidence?

Parrot Face was not even close to being the first to do the "making the s sounds like th" thing. It was a staple of vaudeville routines and was probalby most popularized by Mel Blanc's voicings of Daffy Duck ("Thuffering Thuoccatash!", "You're dethpicable!") in Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoons.

The Igor in my head is much more of a composite of the traditional Universal Studios Igor played by Bela Lugosi in "Son of Frankenstein" (although this character did not lisp) and Marty Feldman's Igor in "Young Frankenstein," combined with Bobby Boris Pickett's talk-singing on the 1962 hit, "Monster Mash," although the narrator doesn't really lisp is not Igor (the Igor mentioned in the song is chained to a wall).

The genius of Pterry's reinvention of Igors is that they almost instantly establish a definitive culturally historical interpretation for the Igor that doesn't really exist. I simply can't imagine any Igor NOT sounding or acting like Pterry's Igors.